Occult Chemistry G 77
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.Reaction to the quark model in the theoretical physics community
was also far from benign. "Getting the CERN [European Center] re-
port published in the form that I wanted," wrote Gell-Mann (later to
receive the Nobel Prize for physics), "was so difficult I finally gave up
trying. When the physics department of a leading university was con-
sidering an appointment for me, their senior theorist, one of the most
respected spokesmen for all of theoretical physics, blocked the ap-
pointment at a faculty meeting by passionately arguing that it was the
work of a 'charlatan.'" To which Gell-Mann added, modestly, "The
idea that hadrons [protons and neutrons], citizens of a nuclear democ-
racy, were made of elementary particles with fractional quantum num-
bers did seem a bit rich.The idea, however, is apparently correct."
And correct it was. At SLAC, where protons were routinely being
bombarded by electrons at very high energy, an alert technician noted
within a proton three rapidly moving pointlike constituents. Could
these be quarks?
When the experiment was repeated at Fermilab and at CERN using
muons as projectiles (muons are identical with electrons, only two
hundred times heavier and ten times as energetic), the conclusion was
inevitable: a proton consists of three quarks.
What the theosophists sixty years earlier had seen so clearly with their
siddhi vision could be revealed only now to physicists.The magrutude of
the effort this required can be judged by the fact that to study one
atom the physicists needed one electron-volt of energy, but to reveal a
quark-whose radius they estimate at .ooooooooooooooooooooo~ of
a centimeter, or a don times smaller-required ten blllion electron-
vo1ts.A~ for the theosophists' UPA, or "subquark," it was still clearly many
dimensions smaller.
By the end of the 1970s the physicists'model had developed into six
different kinds of quarks, five of which had been identified and given
the Alice-in-Wonderland "flavors" of up, down, charm, strange, and
bottom.The last, and heaviest, remained elusive until mid-1994 when
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